About the author (1984)

A native of the Abkhazia region in Georgia, Iskander is a noted Russian novelist. Most of his works are set in his native region and other areas of Georgia. Their first-person narrations and seemingly guileless comic wit allow Iskander to touch on various delicate topics. The Goatibex Constellation (1970) is a very funny satire on the Soviet bureaucracy and on Trofim Lysenko's misguided yet once influential (in the Khrushchev period) biological fantasies. Iskander takes a different tact in his second novel, Sandro from Chegem (1973), a series of anecdotes about an Abkhazian's life from the 1880s to the 1960s. The protagonist's saga---sometimes witty, sometimes terrifying---allows the author to tell the turbulent story of the Abkhazian people. A small part of this very large work was published in the Soviet Union in the liberal periodical Novy mir (New World). The complete text appeared first in the West and was reissued in Russia only during the Gorbachev period.